A FOUR DIMENSIONAL ALPHABET

My daughter, Rudi, once joked to me that all the visual poets that I correspond with online are actually 12 year olds trying to lure me in by pretending to be middle aged men interested in punctuation and typography. But now Rudi, who really is 12, has created this visual poetry video.

Upon my return from visiting Dan Waber and Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, in Kingston, Pennsylvania where I did a reading with Geof Huth, and attended a few events at Dan and Jennifer's fantastic Paper Kite Studio and Gallery -- they've really created a marvellous centre for writing, art, theatre, and community -- I asked Rudi to show me how to do animation in Flash. As she was showing me, she became enthusiastic about creating a little visual poetry video ("I can't believe I'm so into this. What a nerd! But it's really fascinating," she exclaimed as she quickly created the video.) I added some music from a transformation of Beethoven's Op. 111 (Piano Sonata #32) that I've been working on, and together we've made our first collaborative poetry video. And, beware, O you visual poets out there. Perhaps I am nine, and my daughter is fifty-four.

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Here is Geof Huth's account of our reading and Paper Kite. He did a great reading, playing with the form of a reading presentation, and the writer's place in it, presenting a beguiling array of different kinds of work, bravely improvising a poem/anecdote/commentary, and creating, extempore, a poem song. He also published a lovely "handout" of all the work that he presented, except for that which he improvised (it was more of a fully fledged-- colour cover no less!-- chapbook) which allowed us to revisit the work that he read. And I was very happy to discover that he, his wife, Nancy, and Jennifer and Dan, were not 12 year old poseurs, but actual lovely, engaging adults.